Monthly Archives: November 2016

With gadgets now tracking everything from sleep habits to blood pressure, you might assume that science supports the hypothesis that personalized health information promotes better decisions. However, a new study suggests that people who learn about their personalized risk of…

A new study suggests that as our brains age, groups of connections that co-ordinate brain activity during memory tasks become smaller and more numerous, indicating reduced cohesion. Elizabeth Davison of Princeton University, USA, and colleagues describe a novel method to…

Malaria elimination in sub-Saharan Africa may be possible in certain conditions Many countries have eliminated malaria over the past century, but no sub-Saharan African country has yet stamped out the disease. In their recently published study, researchers from the Institute…

From watching coconut crabs in the wild, Shin-ichiro Oka knew their claws were amazingly strong. And the crabs are known to be able to lift as much as 28 kilograms — seven times their top body weight of 4 kg.…

Proteins called prions are well known for causing fatal diseases in animals, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans and “mad cow disease” in cattle. New research published in PLOS Pathogens could help scientists uncover the mechanisms used by prions to…

Environmental DNA in seawater may help monitor deep-water fish populations Fish that live in remote polar and deep-water habitats are threatened by climate change and increased fishing efforts. However, monitoring these fish populations through traditional techniques such as bottom trawling…

Teaming with life, coral reefs are some of the most diverse ecosystems on earth. Countless numbers of marine species depend on these reefs, and humans do as well. With so much dependent on the tiny animals that construct these reefs,…

Ebola virus is thought to be one of the most deadly known to man, and the most recent estimates suggest that the 2013-2016 West African outbreak has killed around 40 percent of the more than 28,000 people who have had…

Population size differences may have driven loss of Neanderthal genes Humans and Neanderthals interbred tens of thousands of years ago, but over time, natural selection has purged many Neanderthal genes from the human genome. To understand how modern humans lost…

When people make decisions that seem irrational, a common explanation is that they seek evidence confirming what they already believe. But confirmation bias may not be the only factor that skews the way we gather information, according to a new…